Well, after much time and anticipation, this week HBO Max has released the director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, or as I call it, The Butthole Cut.
Because much like The Butthole Cut of the Cats movie, there seems to have been some impression among fandom that there would be a director’s cut that would redeem a fiasco movie, even if it was presented as just a joke. The difference being that the Snyder Cut actually exists.
At this point I need to digress. Whatever the merits of Zack Snyder, the judgment on Justice League is largely tied up with fandom perceptions of both him and the guy who finished the theatrical release, Joss Whedon. Prior to Joss getting involved, Zack Snyder was being called out as a filmmaker for being sexist (Sucker Punch), or fascist and homophobic (specifically 300). But what really caused social media to hate this guy was that he confessed to being an Ayn Rand fan who (still) talks about producing a new version of The Fountainhead. And I’ve already done an extensive analysis on how Batman v Superman proves that if Snyder is a follower of Rand’s aesthetic philosophy, he’s not a very good one.
But Snyder and his production company were called upon to do Wonder Woman (which he did not direct) and Justice League, which proceeds directly from the conclusion of BvS, and midway through the filming of Justice League, his young daughter committed suicide and Zack and his wife Deborah (a co-producer in his company) had to leave the film in order to grieve. And it needs to be said that whatever one thinks of Joss Whedon, he wouldn’t have been hired to complete Justice League if Zack had still been available.
But at the time, Joss had something of a golden boy reputation, being the main creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character who was his primary example of feminist empowerment. Whedon was also an experienced script doctor and director who did the fast-paced and witty Avengers movie for Marvel as well as the less successful but still blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron. So Warner/DC seemed to think he would be the best person to take over for their interrupted project, but even those of us who liked the theatrical release had to concede it was awkwardly pasted together from improvised parts – like when Henry Cavill had to reshoot scenes after taking on a role that obliged him to grow a mustache, so that half of the time Superman’s upper lip looks weird because it had to be CGI’ed.
The mixed reviews on Ultron and negative feedback on Justice League were causing Whedon to lose his luster already, and even before this, his feminist cred was undermined when his wife announced she was divorcing him largely over affairs she accused him of having with his Buffy co-workers. Where this all ties into Justice League and support for The Snyder Cut is that Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in Justice League, has taken action against Warner Media, including the DC Comics film arm, claiming that Joss Whedon was unprofessional to him and others on the Justice League set, and that higher-ups in production were enabling and covering for this. Fisher, much like Colin Kaepernick, seems willing to speak truth to power even at the risk of his career. But recently Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on Buffy and Angel, agreed to make a statement on Fisher’s behalf and then posted an extended tweet detailing how Whedon had harassed her backstage and pushed her out of the Angel show. (The whole thing had previously been behind the scenes, but the treatment of Cordelia Chase was not popular with Buffyverse fans even at the time.) This caused almost every other actor on the Buffy and Angel shows to make social media posts, some merely in support of Carpenter, others (like Michelle Trachtenberg) corroborating her accusations. More recently Whedon was involved with another HBO project called The Nevers, and announced he was quitting over the perennial “exhaustion.”
So the end result is that Whedon, once considered a feminist hero, is scum, and Snyder, who was once considered scum, is now treated like a heroic auteur who is finally getting to present his work the way he wanted it. This is all a great example of why I do not support “cancel culture” or political correctness in general, because such judgments are superficial, transitory, and based on information that is subject to change. It is why I make no apologies for separating a judgment of an artist’s work from their behavior as a human being. (See also- J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Rowling, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.)
Now, given that I am a Whedon fan, I liked the movie Justice League (with reservations) and I didn’t like BvS (although I did like Man of Steel), the main value of the Justice League Snyder Cut is to prove once and for all whether the problems with the theatrical Justice League were Whedon screwing up something that would have worked without him, or Whedon trying to salvage something that wouldn’t have worked anyway.
(And there’s no point in prefacing ‘SPOILERS’ because I know everybody’s seen this movie before me and this post is just giving my impression of it.)
As we know, the Snyder version of Justice League is exactly four hours and two minutes. In theory the whole thing should be easier to digest because Zack divided his narrative into separate chapters (much as producers indicate specific scenes in the DVD release of a movie), but even in pieces the movie goes very slowly because Snyder’s scenes seem to be in slow-motion even when they’re not. His camera has three speeds: Slow, reallllly slow and real fast. In fact, the scenes where Wonder Woman deflects bullets make her look that much faster than The Flash using his superspeed powers, because Snyder, like every other director since The Six Million Dollar Man, indicates a character’s superhuman speed by slowing the camera down.
If nothing else, Snyder’s cut explains why Ray Fisher is so damn pissed at Whedon and the DC execs who approved the 2017 film, because there’s less of his character in that one than there is of Vic Stone’s original body. This film actually shows his backstory and notes, among other things, that Victor Stone was a computer genius even before he got powers. Fisher is very expressive in these scenes and really conveys the pain of his character.
The main improvement on Justice League as a narrative is that where the 2017 cut presented Steppenwolf as the Big Bad (including the Ancient Age flashback scene) and barely mentioned Darkseid, here Steppenwolf is clearly a lieutenant of Darkseid, who is using the Mother Boxes in an attempt to attain the “Anti-Life Equation” that is supposed to grant control over life, although it’s odd that the discovery of the Equation on Earth seems to be kind of an afterthought, but I guess Darkseid’s memory wasn’t so good 6000 years after coming here the last time. And of course some people make comparisons between that character and Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War when in the comics, Darkseid was created first. The real problem is that while Thanos in the movies was mostly CGI, he was still played by Josh Brolin, who gave him a certain gravitas and an understandable (if not sympathetic) motivation. Steppenwolf is just a CGI effect (even if he is shiny and chrome) and Darkseid in this movie isn’t much more than that.
But THEN, after at least three and a half hours of actual movie, they had the after-credits scene now placed before the credits, in which Deathstroke meets Luthor after he escapes the asylum, and it looks much like Whedon’s scene, except that the dialogue is a lot more climactic. Except that scene isn’t the climax. Right after that scene, with no segue, they just go straight to the apocalypse “Knightmare” scenario Bruce Wayne dreamed in BvS, where Batman has to lead a last-chance mission with Cyborg, Flash, Deathstroke, Mera, and Marilyn Manson Jared Leto’s Joker. And that doesn’t get resolved or explained any better than it did in BvS. But after Bruce wakes up, he finally gets to meet the seventh member of the League, and that part was at least a cool geek moment. It’s just that with all the flak The Return of the King movie got for being anti-climax, nobody talks about this thing.
See, in my review of BvS, I’d mentioned that the director’s cut of that movie really was superior – not necessarily good, but a lot better than what came out – and one of the reasons it didn’t come out in general release is that all the extras put over thirty minutes on a movie that was already overlong.
What it comes down to for me is that if you need four hours to make your movie even coherent, then you’re really not that good a filmmaker. And the thing is, in the new media environment, ironically promoted by HBO Max, this sort of thing isn’t even necessary. Streaming services mean you can do long-form storytelling now. WandaVision, for instance, was more a miniseries than a feature movie, but its premise didn’t really provide for more than a single storyline.
Although there was a pretty detailed overview in Pajiba of all places, and one of the things they pointed out is that the need to put the pieces together on Justice League during the spread of coronavirus was in some respect a good thing – Deborah Snyder said, “‘No, this is the right time because our visual effects houses that (we) rely on so much are running out of work, so now is the time to be doing this.” So at least you can say that much for these guys.
But essentially, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is like the BvS director’s cut, only more so. A LOT more so. Whatever people might think of Joss Whedon now, remember when he wasn’t doing his own projects he was a professional script doctor. That was his job here. As with BvS, the studio wanted to get the thing cranked out as a two-hour movie, and he did that. The problem versus the Snyder Cut is that Whedon cut one, most of Ray Fisher’s stuff, and two, the Darkseid background explaining the whole premise. But it’s not like including it helped that much. Snyder at least didn’t keep Whedon’s odd premise that Superman was some mythic inspirational figure like the comic character became over the course of decades, where Snyder’s previous movies presented him as this Iron Age vigilante who was just more powerful than everybody else and who hadn’t been around nearly as long as even Batman. Snyder’s cut just gets straight to the premise of fighting Steppenwolf. Except of course, it’s the radical antithesis of getting straight to the point. So this would work better as a set ’em up action movie than Whedon’s cut, except that it’s four fuckin’ hours, and the reason Whedon had to lop so much was to make Justice League a better action movie. Yeah, Part 6 got to show the heroes blow up a bunch of stuff real good, but the Marvel movies are accused of being a bunch of big-budget scenes to blow stuff up real good, and they work a lot better on other levels. For one thing, Marvel directors can get a story across IN LESS THAN FOUR FUCKIN’ HOURS, and if they can’t (like the Russo brothers) they know to split it into sequels.
But as Batman once said, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”